Search engines use complex mathematical algorithms to interpret which websites a user seeks. In this diagram, if each bubble represents a website, programs sometimes called spiders examine which sites link to which other sites, with arrows representing these links. Websites getting more inbound links, or stronger links, are presumed to be more important and what the user is searching for. In this example, since website B is the recipient of numerous inbound links, it ranks more highly in a web search. And the links "carry through", such that website C, even though it only has one inbound link, has an inbound link from a highly popular site (B) while site E does not. Note: Percentages are rounded.

Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is the search provider most commonly used for this strategy. With this tactic, brands conduct keyword research and create campaigns that target the best keywords for their industry, products, or services. When users search for those keywords, they see the custom ads at the top or bottom of SERPs. The brand is charged each time a user clicks on the ad.
You’ve launched an amazing product or service. Now what? Now, you need to get the word out. When done well, good PR can be much more effective and less expensive than advertising. Regardless of whether you want to hire a fancy agency or awesome consultant, make sure that you know what you’re doing and what types of ROI to expect. Relationships are the heart and soul of PR. This guide will teach you how to ignore the noise and focus on substantive, measurable results. Get Started
Great SEO is increasingly dependent on having a website with a great user experience. To make your user experience great requires carefully tracking what people do so that you always know where to improve. But what do you track? In this 15-minute talk, I’ll cover three effective and advanced ways to use event tracking in Google Analytics to understand a website's user.

Starting in 2014 and kicking things up a notch two years later, Google’s Keyword Planner tool began grouping volumes for similar terms. Instead of showing keyword A gets searched 100 times per month and keyword A1 gets searched 50 times per month, both would show 150. Google said the reason for this to make sure “you don’t miss out on potential customers” and to “maximize the potential for your ads to show on relevant searches.”

In 2007, Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank.[30] On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat any nofollow links, in the same way, to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting.[31] As a result of this change the usage of nofollow led to evaporation of PageRank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash and JavaScript.[32]
Your SEO keywords are the keywords and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines "speaks the same language" as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site. Keywords are one of the main elements of SEO.
And finally, the other really important bucket is authority. Google wants to show sites that are popular. If they can show the most popular t-shirt seller to people looking to buy t-shirts online, that’s the site they want to show. So you have to convince Google - send them signals that your site is the most popular site for the kind of t-shirts that you sell.
While SEO doesn’t guarantee that you will keep receiving traffic on autopilot for a long time, it does give you the peace of mind that doesn’t come with PPC marketing. Once you rank for a particular keyword, you can keep doing the needed on-page SEO to maintain your rank. By being more sustainable, SEO can help you dominate a market segment without burning a hole in the wallet.
This is why developing a list of keywords is one of the first and most important steps in any search engine optimization initiative. Keywords and SEO are directly connected when it comes to running a winning search marketing campaign. Because keywords are foundational for all your other SEO efforts, it's well worth the time and investment to ensure your SEO keywords are highly relevant to your audience and effectively organized for action.
In an evolving mobile-first web, we can utilize pre-empting solutions to create winning value propositions, which are designed to attract and satisfy search engine crawlers and keep consumers happy. I'll outline a strategy and share tactics that help ensure increased organic reach, in addition to highlighting smart ways to view data, intent, consumer choice theory and crawl optimization.

Content marketing is more than just blogging. When executed correctly, content including articles, guides (like this one), webinars, and videos can be powerful growth drivers for your business. Focus on building trust and producing amazing quality. And most of all, make sure that you’re capturing the right metrics. Create content to generate ROI. Measure the right results. This guide will teach you how. Get Started

Search engine marketing (SEM) is related to SEO in that they both deal with digital marketing outreach on search engines like Google and Bing. However, SEO typically refers to internal, organic website optimization while search engine marketing is commonly known as advertising through a paid media budget. While SEO will help your website traffic increase through natural algorithmic means, SEM earns traffic through the process of purchasing ads on search engines. In the image to the left, you will see a search engine results page that is the result of typing the keyword “digital marketing” into Google. The top four results have a small green box that says “ad” underneath the primary title link. This signifies paid advertising, or search engine marketing, where a brand or business has paid Google to display their ads at the top of the page for that specific keyword.

Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience. The operative term here is topics -- by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.

For example, let’s say you were running the website of an online pet store. You might be wise to create one keyword grouping for all your dog-related products, then one for all of your parakeet-related projects, etc. The next step would be to segment each individual group into smaller subgroups (parakeet cages, parakeet toys, parakeet snacks) and then even smaller groups for each type of product (low-fat parakeet snacks, luxury parakeet snacks… you get the idea). Now your pet store can create individual pages optimized for each small keyword group.

SEM search results have ad extensions. SEO search results have featured snippets. When comparing SEM vs. SEO, you’ll also find differences in the appearance of the search results. SEM search results may include ad extensions, which can add on additional links, phone numbers, and callouts. On the other hand, SEO results may appear with featured snippets in search.